Archive for the ‘House’ Category

The House Cronos is located in Pinamar, atlantic coast of the province of Buenos Aires. The project responds to the need to build a holiday home for summer and winter in full contact with nature.

The land is in its natural state, presents a significant amount of typical conifers of the area, a sandy soil and visuals open to the forest. The House Cronos seeks to manifest a way of understanding and living a holiday home, based on contact with light and nature, flexibility and quality of spaces, the nobility of technique and materials and the search for an image that reflect its own contemporaneity.

The Location: Amanali Golf and Nautical club in the city of Tepeji del Rio, Hidalgo. A 45 minute drive from Mexico City.

The Site: two adjacent plots of 14 mts. length by 36 mts. depth (504 mts.2) each, with the back facing North. The site has a continuous slant of 4 mts. from front to back.

The restrictions: The housing complex establishes restrictions of open space: 6 mts. to the front, which faces the lake; 7 mts. in the back (adjacent to the golf course); and 5 mts. alongside the lateral common border of both plots of land.

Located within a conservation district, this home celebrates the traditional charm of Peranakan shophouses with the addition of new spaces that are sensitive to the building’s rich heritage.

Akin to traditional shophouses, the spaces are interspersed with courtyards that serve as visual focal points. The original courtyard – with its preserved ornate fish mould centerpiece and accompanying water feature – forms the heart of the common areas while a newer courtyard marks the transition from the old structure into its new extension. A young tree in the centre of this new courtyard adds a touch of nature to the urban ensemble. To the rear of the house are the kitchen and a retro spiral staircase that leads to the second floor master bedroom and rooftop terrace.

To build a minimalist house with simple clean lines, uncluttered geometry, fluid, transparent spaces where the interiors and exteriors blend into each other in an attempt to keep the user constantly in touch with the outdoors.

The site with thriving greenery was located just outside vadodara city. The brief was very clear – to design a contemporary house for this family of three and their support staff meeting their functional requirements. The challenge of the site really lay in preserving the natural vegetation that abounded on the plot. The planning went through several iterations in a bid to preserve as many of the trees on site as possible.

In a seemingly infinite territory and mostly occupied by pines and oaks, the implantation of the house marks a space and an intention. A space of pause, serenity and breathing, surrounded and protected by the green patch that filters the light and the eyesight, purifies the air and the soul and stimulates the corporal senses of who let himself be seduced by the elements of nature. An intention of materializing a perennial refuge that transforms and adapts itself to the site’s conditions and to the family that inhabits it.

Comprised of perpendicular bars atop a hill overlooking the village of Healdsburg, this home offers both ample social space ideal for entertaining and the privacy of a rural retreat.

The taller section runs along the ridge of the hill and houses the home’s great room under lofty ceilings and a simple shed overhanging roof, filled with light and views let in through tall glass walls. Four oversized glass panels open dramatically on each side, transforming the space into an outdoor pavilion whose flush concrete floors extend into a poolside patio to the north and into a terrace featuring a fire pit to the south to offer comfortable outdoor areas for both hot and cool weather. With these doors drawn up, the site offers one sweeping, continuous view from the pool, through the great room, and down into the distant village below.

Unlike the introverted quality of the traditional courtyard house, the owner of this site asked for a variety of mix-use program, including tea house, dinning, party space, office, meeting, as well as dwelling and entertainment. Thecontemporary and sometime “public” program opened up the courtyard to become “extraverted”, so as to induce more human interactions. These required us to break the general understanding of the courtyard as an enclosed typology by introducing the experience of “meandering in the hutongs” into the courtyard, and the interventional approach was derived from the unfolding spatial narrative of hutong life.

Studio Sitges is a live/work space for a photographer and his family. Located three blocks from the

Mediterranean Sea, the building captures the casual energy of this cosmopolitan beach town thirty minutes from Barcelona.

The house is zoned vertically, with two large below-grade photography studios anchoring the building, a main floor for entertaining both large and small groups, and private areas above. A glass elevator moves between floors and culminates in an intimate rooftop atelier. Kundig describes the whole house as a studio—a space in which things can happen.

On a plot in Tokyo, a small garden has been thriving next to an old house for a long time. As the tiny existing building was replaced, our client really wanted to preserve the garden and allow it to sprawl all around the house. The small plot should also fit a parking, the maximum footprint of the house, and the necessary gap to the site perimeter. The client is a couple that will first use this house as a weekend house before eventually moving to Tokyo. They also have grown-up children living in Tokyo and abroad that will inhabit the house from time to time. Therefore, the program was fairly unspecified, and rather than making a house with many small rooms, we opted for a concept which gives a few large spaces in this small house.

From making huts of two fold paper in childhood to buildings in the public realm, architecture has been always been all around us in one form or another. The Apex is an approach to residential architecture from basics to the modern. The triangular form with the conventional notion of a home in the country has been converted into an elegant structure that houses the living spaces within.